Yemen

Music has always been an integral part of the State of Israel. It seems like every year, every war, and every major event in the tiny nation’s history has produced its own special song.

That’s one reason why the annual Eurovision song contest has meant so much to the Israeli people. The annual competition allows dozens of countries to enter a short song, performed by native singers before a panel of judges. Winning is always a longshot given the crowded competition, but Israel achieved its stunning first win in the contest in 1978 followed by an equally stunning victory the following year.

Four years after that repeat victory, the competition was set in the emotionally charged city of Munich where eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team had been murdered by Palestinian terrorists just 11 years earlier.

It’s been seven decades since the 1948 Arab-Israeli, and yet there are still an estimated 4 million Palestinian refugees…and zero Jewish refugees. With so many nearby Arab allies of the Palestinians, how did this happen? What does it say about Israel? What does it say about its Arab neighbors?

Seraphic Secret has been writing about the Jews of Yemen for quite a while. An ancient Jewish community, The Jews of Yemen have long been oppressed by their government and their Muslim neighbors.

Soon, Yemen, like the rest of the Arab Muslim world—except for Morocco’s 2,000 Jews—will be Judenrein, forcibly cleansed of Jews.

Here’s the story of two young Jews who have been documenting the last of the Yemeni Jews and remarkably—because no other media outlet has reported on this—inform us that Jew-hatred spews from public loudspeakers on a daily basis.

Think of it, there are just a 67 Jews left in Yemen, yet the Mosques and the government blame Jews for all their troubles.

Hey, I have a fab-u-lous idea, let’s ethnically cleanse Judea and Samaria of Jews and create yet one more dysfunctional radical Islamist state built on pathological Jew-hatred.

They also encountered the strange paradox of living in a place where, they found, the Yemenis as individuals were utterly hospitable and open — even “goofy,” Strecher said — but where antisemitism was rife; where Berer said he often felt “like a criminal, like a fugitive”; where they had to hide the fact that they were Jews.

The experience was not dissimilar from how the Yemeni Jews themselves interacted with their society.

“People who knew them thought of them as the ‘good Jews’,” Strecher said. “But the idea of Jews was repulsive to the general public. I’m not exaggerating. Every week, you heard on the loudspeakers about how the Jews were the cause of all evil, the root of everybody’s problem.”

Partly as a reaction — as a form of “defiance,” as they put it — the two found themselves embracing their Jewish identities as they never had before.

On Fox News Sunday, top White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan said the administration “absolutely” intends to keep sending Guantanamo prisoners to Yemen. The administration has sent seven detainees to the country, Brennan said, with six of those sent in December. “Several of those detainees were put into Yemeni custody right away,” Brennan said. He did not elaborate on how many is “several” or where the other Guantanamo inmates sent to Yemen might be today. But he said the U.S. has faith in Yemen to handle the situation. “We’ve had close dialogue with the Yemeni government about the expectations that we have as far as what they’re supposed to do when these detainees go back,” Brennan said.

5. In September, 2008, al-Qaeda terrorists attacked the U.S. embassy on the outskirts of the capital, Sanaa, leaving 19 people dead.

6. Brennan says that the U.S. is working closely with the government of Yemen. Really? Is that why the U.S. and Great Britain shuttered their embassies in Sanaa, Yemen’s capital? Make no mistake about it, the Americans and the British high-tailing it out of Yemen is a great victory for the terrorists. Especially after the Christmas airline bombing.

7. Brennan claims, in the same interview, that there are no more than a “couple hundred” al-Qaeda members in Yemen. He said this with a straight face. Look, Yemen might be the most terrorist happy country in a world of Islamic terrorist-loving countries. Al-Qaeda does not hand out membership cards. There are no monthly dues. But Yemen is lousy with al-Qaeda sympathizers and volunteers. I’m sure it’s in the tens of thousands. That’s why Saudi Arabia is conducting raids into Yemen on a daily basis where they are wiping out entire villages.

8. Yemeni President/Dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh maintains power with the assistance and support of al-Qaeda. There’s no way he’s going to undermine his terrorist buddies in any meaningful way. His strategy is simple. Press Barack Hussein Obama for lots of money and tons of weapons, ostensibly to fight al-Qaeda, but in reality, Yemen’s flying a double flag.

9. The Jews of Yemen, one of the oldest Jewish communities in history, is now all but extinct. I’m waiting for one of those so-called human rights groups to, um, investigate why every Islamic country—save Morocco’s 2,000 Jews—is Judenrein.

10. A CIA officer wisely advised: “Yesterday’s war was Iraq, today’s war is in Afghanistan, tomorrow’s war is Yemen.”

The reason the country is uneasy about the Obama administration’s response to this attack is a distinct sense of not just incompetence but incomprehension. From the very beginning, President Obama has relentlessly tried to play down and deny the nature of the terrorist threat we continue to face. Napolitano renames terrorism “man-caused disasters.” Obama goes abroad and pledges to cleanse America of its post-9/11 counterterrorist sins. Hence, Guantanamo will close, CIA interrogators will face a special prosecutor, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed will bask in a civilian trial in New York — a trifecta of political correctness and image management.

And just to make sure even the dimmest understand, Obama banishes the term “war on terror.” It’s over — that is, if it ever existed.

Obama may have declared the war over. Unfortunately, al-Qaeda has not. Which gives new meaning to the term “asymmetric warfare.”

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About Me
Robert J. Avrech
Los Angeles, California

I'm an Emmy Award winning screenwriter. I'm also an observant Jew, a religious Zionist, a conservative Republican, and a member of the NRA. I've been writing and producing in Hollywood for over twenty-five years. But the focus of my life is my family: my radiant wife, Karen—with whom I have been in love with since I was nine years-old—and my two daughters, who, thankfully, look like Karen. Not too long ago, we had three children. But our son, Ariel, died at the age of twenty-two from cancer. We miss him terribly. We think about him practically every minute of every day. People tell us that time heals, but Karen and I know this is not true. Time grinds away doing its terrible work. Ariel is gone. Yet absence becomes presence.

Ariel Chaim Avrech, ZT'L, May His Righteous Memory be a Blessing.

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